Sleep Medicine PA

[sharpieaccent]

Is it possible for PAs to specialize/work in sleep medicine?

 

Anybody know anything like hours, salary etc?

[Scoped]

I owned a Sleep Center for 5 years and we employed PA's. You would not read/interpret data from Polysomnograms or be responsible to diagnose any sleep disorders. This could be achieved outside of being a doc but you would need a Phd in sleep and take the AASM sleep boards and I think know you must also fellow with a current sleep doc. You basically just take histories, write referrals to the sleep center and do follow ups. It's really not that glamours and very repetitive. Most Sleep PA's I know work it as a part time gig and typically work in pulmonary for a full time job. Many sleep centers do not have board certified sleep docs in the office, often when they do they don't see patients. I live in Alaska and my docs lived in ID and PA. They would read off a server and remotely and send the information back and the PA would deliver it to the patient or write the script for thearpy.

[whoRyou]

I can help you some as I am considering to become a Polysomnographic Technologist (PSGTs) to gain HCE for PA schools. Most sleep recordings are made during the patient's usual sleep hours. So many Polysomnographic Technologists work during the evening and night. Often the shift is 10-12 hours and the work week is sometimes limited to 3 nights. Depending on the size of the sleep lab, several techs may work together or the sleep tech may work alone for the entire night.

[jdenning]

I work in a neurology group and one of our physicians does sleep medicine. As mentioned above, I don't do any interpretation of sleep studies or diagnosis but I handle a lot of troubleshooting and see a lot of patients for follow up and I handle a ton of meds/refills. I don't mind it because my practice is such that see a lot of other types of patients as well - epilepsy, MS, neurodegenerative disease etc. I think seeing only sleep patients would actually be pretty boring.

 

for what it's worth

[CakeSniffer13]

On 3/28/2015 at 8:28 PM, whoRyou said:

I can help you some as I am considering to become a Polysomnographic Technologist (PSGTs) to gain HCE for PA schools. Most sleep recordings are made during the patient's usual sleep hours. So many Polysomnographic Technologists work during the evening and night. Often the shift is 10-12 hours and the work week is sometimes limited to 3 nights. Depending on the size of the sleep lab, several techs may work together or the sleep tech may work alone for the entire night.

I know this post is years old, but I was wondering is you were able to gain experience for PA school as a sleep tech? That's what I am trying to do but I don't know if any schools accept that kind of experience as valid.

[rev ronin]

4 hours ago, CakeSniffer13 said:

I know this post is years old, but I was wondering is you were able to gain experience for PA school as a sleep tech? That's what I am trying to do but I don't know if any schools accept that kind of experience as valid.

It would be reasonable experience.  You are in charge of a patient, certified, paid... not as good as nursing, because theoretically your patients are stable enough for a sleep study, but it's better than, say, CNA or patient transporter, and reasonably well paying on its own.